Dear Readers,
Thanks for joining me here again for another Dose of Fiction.
Knowing change is inevitable doesn’t make it easy to adjust to. I still feel the clutch of anxiety when a long-time friend moves far away, or when my favorite store goes out of business, or when I find a new cobweb of wrinkles at the corners of my eyes.
However, I have a very patient teacher, and I rely on that teacher to help me with the constant adjustments I must make.
My garden.
It’s something that is never the same, day to day, month to month, or year to year.
This Weekly Dose of Fiction came from my morning of trimming and cultivating and thinking about how the last time I did the same chores, everything I was tending to was very different. Was that just last week? Perhaps.
Garden Lessons
The weather cranked up the heat before I could harvest the cilantro crop that I so looked forward to. It bolted to seed, desperate to propagate before shriveling under the sudden spike in temperature.
As I contemplate this sad droop of peppery greens, I remember other more reasonable years when the air warmed gently and steadily, when winter was clearly defined as was spring, and that long, lovely summer. Rain came in late October as if set on a timer, and if snow didn’t fall for Christmas, it was the world’s end, for sure.
Or did I imagine all of that predictability?
I move along with my tool bag in hand to the green beans that have spiraled their way up the poles, blossomed, and now promise that I will soon have one of my favorite vegetables all season. I will, that is, if the gopher I now see tunneling along the rock-lined edge doesn’t gobble their roots. The wind sighs past, and my sigh harmonizes with it.
Those deep exhales became more frequent after the accident, after my well-planned life was swept away, leaving me without a single signpost:
This Way.
Enter.
The dark days, I call them. There were no seasons. No garden. And the darkness lasted for over a year until one day, daffodils and tulips I’d planted and forgotten poked hopeful shoots from the dirt, then opened into a rainbow of color.
Come out.
See what we’ve changed into--bulbs no more. Flowers now.
This way.
Enter.
Five friends plan futures. One obsessed loner plots escape. The collision between them could be fatal.
Poignant.
Thank you for this beautiful article with many life lessons in it.